A Small Town In Germany by John Le Carré

Yes, there’s been a little gap in the blogging and that’s because I’ve been travelling and moving around quite a lot and trying (and so far failing (due to the speed of the process rather than encountering any major problem)) to finalise importing my dog back to the UK in a couple of months when I return to England’s London while also figuring out how to make sure I have a little extra money put aside in case the dog import/export costs more than I had budgeted. I’ve done the “finding a bit of work” thing now, so I can relax a little, for a bit. And blog, baby, blog.

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One of the multiple books I’ve read over the past couple of weeks – and the simplest, hence why I’m commenting on this first – is John Le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany (1968), which I’d never heard of before finding this tasty paperback in a Margate secondhand bookshop one weekend in September.

The reason why I’ve never heard of it (and the reason why you’ve probably never heard of it too) is because this is the first of Le Carré’s novels (and maybe the last for a while, too – I did my research glance at Wikipedia an hour ago and I’m not going back, no way!) to not feature his ugly incel(ish) anti-James Bond hero, George Smiley. Oh no!

Does this mean that it isn’t as good as the more famous texts? Much like the last Le Carré I read, no, it doesn’t. (A Le Carré novel not being famous means nothing, it seems, as this novel is, also, excellent. Maybe I should be reading more Le Carrés? Maybe I should be getting a life?)

It’s great!

It’s excellent.

It’s a really fun and engaging thriller.

Much like some the other texts I’ve read by Le Carré, there is a playfulness with genre expectations here, especially regarding conventions related to narrative.

In this novel, we open with a person missing from the British Embassy in West Germany, with the presumption that he’s probably defected to the Soviet Union, as a load of files and documents are missing.

A detective type person is sent from London to investigate, and this detective type person is not an aristo-type (like all the diplomats), so Le Carré quickly introduces his favoured theme of Class to the text. The man who is missing is also not an aristo-type, and was a child refugee sent to England during the Nazi era, and he has been working in West Germany for the British Embassy for a couple of decades by the time of the novel. During his employment, he has always been a steadfast worker, though kept on recurring one year contracts all that time. This is relevant.

What becomes clear as soon as the detective begins asking around, is that no one is quite certain what crime has been committed.

There seems to be nothing initially linking the missing man to any rival powers, and nothing in his recent or longer-term history either (bar a former friend who he knew as a fellow child refugee who is currently a rising star in West German politics, though he seems far more of the Right than of the Soviet-sympathising Left, so not a concern for the British).

As well as the files and the man, there are also missing objects from around the embassy, though these allude to a small scale professional thieving operation, rather than anything less base. There are also rumours about the missing man having brief love affairs and occasional punch-ups in German bars, and there is also a frequent reference to him being the go-to guy at the Embassy for slightly dodgy black market consumer electronics (especially hair dryers).

The missing man – despite being viewed as lower class than the rest of them – is also seen as useful: reasonably charming, reasonably engaging and someone who is good at getting tasks done, be that finding cheap hair dryers, playing the organ at the local Anglican church, or archiving and research and admin.

The middle third of the novel (to me) felt more like The Name of the Rose than anything else I’ve read that’s more spy genrey.

It’s about archives, and archiving.

It’s about research, structuring research and about ideas of what is past and history, and how the future is made based on a knowledge and awareness of the past.

As the motives behind the protagonist’s archival research and theft of documents become clearer, as the reasons for the aristo diplomats objecting to his motives becomes clearer, as a rising far-right politician begins making more speeches in the region of the embassy, it becomes clearer that there isn’t really a happy ending possible for anyone involved.

The detective type is beaten up and bruised, and he finds the paper trail left by the missing man that links the a political leader with an unpunished war crime, while railing against his understanding of the statute of limitations for Nazi related war crimes. The missing man finds an ethical and moral hole that he hopes to exploit, though it looks unlikely as the novel nears its denouement that this will ever happen…

It’s exciting, it’s very engaging, and it’s also very melancholic. It’s about research and archives, much as it is about diplomacy and politics and class, as these novels often tend to be. I enjoyed it a lot. Yeah, anything else to say? The writing was crisp and direct, often witty, often evocative, and demands attention from a reader as Le Carré does often mention only once something becomes highly significant to the narrative later on. Which is a good thing, I think.

Thank you bye.